1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to print control devices and print control methods for controlling multi-imposition printing in which multiple sets of print data are arranged on a single sheet of printing paper.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, in the so-called commercial printing industry, which involves receiving requests to produce printed materials from a third party (a customer or a client) and delivering the printed materials to receive remuneration from the third party, the mainstream has involved using large scale printing apparatuses such as offset plate printing presses and the like. Here, printed materials include magazines, newspapers, catalogs, advertisements, gravure printing, and the like. In the printing industry, work has advanced to involve various processes such as manuscript input, design/layout, comps (presentations based on printer output), proofing (layout corrections and color correction), press proofs (proof printouts), plate making, printing, post-processing tasks, and shipping. Using the aforementioned printing presses necessitates the making of plates and once plates are made, it is not easy to make corrections to them, and this is considerably disadvantageous in terms of cost. For this reason, careful proofing, that is, work involving layout checks and color confirmations, is essential.
Thus, in the printing industry, large-scale equipment is required and to a certain extent time is also required to produce the printed materials that the client desires. Moreover, specialized knowledge has been required for these respective tasks and the know-how of an experienced and skilled person that can be called a craftsman so to speak has been necessary.
On the other hand, recently, along with greater speed and higher quality in electrophotographic and inkjet printing apparatuses, digital printing known as print on demand (POD) is available that competes in the above-described commercial printing industry. Accordingly, a market based on using this digital printing technology for business is beginning to emerge.
POD aims to handle large volume copies and large volume jobs in a short period. In contrast to conventional large scale printing presses and printing techniques, POD makes maximal use of digital image forming apparatuses such as digital copiers and digital multifunction peripherals for example.
Compared to the conventional printing industry, there is greater digital integration in POD and computer based management and control is more established there, and with this use of computers POD is attempting to approach the level of the printing industry to a certain extent. Further still, since plate making is not necessary with POD, it has become desirable to be able to interrupt a job that is undergoing printing and to form a ganged job from that midway point.
It should be noted that ganged job refers to a job in which multiple jobs are arranged on a media being printed, thereby making more efficient use of the media and maintaining overall throughput as much as possible. Furthermore, ganged jobs are one type of multi-imposition printing in which printing is carried out of multiple impressions (pages) on a single sheet of paper.
Furthermore, with POD there is a tendency toward greater networking with cooperation between digital image forming apparatuses and finishers.
However, in cooperating with sheet cutting devices, which are one type of finisher, although cutting sizes and the like are typically sent to the sheet cutting devices in job tickets and the task of setting cutting sizes has been reduced, a series of operator-dependent tasks still remains. This series of tasks involves the actual paper (media) being carried manually by an operator, aligning the edges of the paper in the sheet cutting device, and confirming cutting positions while loading paper into the sheet cutting device and starting the sheet cutting device.
Against this background, there are combining methods (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-096859 (hereinafter, referred to as “patent document 1”)) in which raster data of each page of multiple jobs undergoes logical addition output in page units as a combining method for multiple jobs. Furthermore, there are methods (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H08-115190 (hereinafter, referred to as “patent document 2”)) in which multiple characteristics of a single job that are described by originally multiple job tickets are collected and combined into one.
Furthermore, as a technique for confirming cutting positions, there are techniques (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-283642 (hereinafter, referred to as “patent document 3”)) and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H07-314844 (hereinafter, referred to as “patent document 4”)) in which marks for preventing cutting are printed in pairs on paper and cutting positions are estimated to cut virtual lines made by joining the paired marks. Also, there are techniques (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-142096 (hereinafter, referred to as “patent document 5”)) in which rather than virtual lines, the actual border lines are formed to draw attention to the cutting positions.
However, the above-mentioned conventional technologies do not anticipate cases such as ganged jobs where pages of different jobs are mixed and present on a single medium and the output sheet thereof is to be cut. For this reason, with the method of patent document 1, since raster images of the pages of two jobs would end up combined on a single medium, pages of two jobs cannot be mixed. Furthermore, the method of patent document 2 allows combining settings in which originally a single job is divided into multiples, but it is not capable of generating a combined job ticket that would allow multiple jobs to share a single media.
Furthermore, with ganged jobs, the content of jobs sharing a single media is not limited to pages having the same height and width such that cutting is complicated. Particularly with POD, since plate making is not necessary, unanticipated job changes can occur in conventional printing using plates such as interrupting a job that is undergoing printing to form a ganged job from that midway point. For this reason, with patent documents 3 and 4, in cases of printed materials having complicated cutting layouts and many white spaces or changing the cutting layout while conducting printing, there are the problems of reduced operational efficiency due to an increase in the operational burden of the operator in estimating and checking cutting positions or causing loading mistakes in the sheet cutting device, etc.
Furthermore, in the case of patent document 5, although the operator can recognize the frame lines more easily than the marks if it is a simple cutting layout, there is a risk that frame lines will remain at the time of cutting since the frame lines are directly formed on the print images. Also, it is anticipated that line portions will be drawn from data of the upper edge, lower edge, right edge, and left edge, and simple frame lines in which the line portions intersect will be created. Thus, in the case of complicated cutting layouts for ganged jobs, no consideration is given to ensuring that line portions do not overlap or that line portions do not extend into the contents where line portions must not be combined.
Furthermore, it is necessary for the operator to pay close attention in order to confirm the cutting positions and must judge with respect to media in which the temporary frame lines are formed whether the lines are line portions inside the intended contents or line portions for cutting, such that problems of reduced operational efficiency have not been resolved after all.